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Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring knowledge from complex teacher models to simpler student models, significantly enhancing model efficiency and accuracy. It has demonstrated substantial advancements in various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Junjie Yang , Junhao Song , Xudong Han , Ziqian Bi , Tianyang Wang , Chia Xin Liang , Xinyuan Song , Yichao Zhang , Qian Niu , Benji Peng , Keyu Chen , Ming Liu

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an essential technique to compress large language models (LLMs) into smaller ones. However, despite the distinct roles of the student model and the teacher model in KD, most existing frameworks still use a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Songming Zhang , Xue Zhang , Tong Zhang , Bojie Hu , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu

Knowledge Distillation (KD) for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important as models grow in size and complexity. While existing distillation approaches focus on imitating teacher behavior, they often overlook the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a pivotal technique for neural network compression and performance enhancement. Most KD methods aim to transfer dark knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Wenqi Niu , Yingchao Wang , Guohui Cai , Hanpo Hou

Knowledge distillation is widely used to improve generalization in practice, yet its theoretical understanding remains elusive. In the standard distillation setting, a teacher model provides soft predictions to guide the training of a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Bingying Li , Haiyun He

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large language models into smaller ones while preserving performance. Despite the recent traction of KD research, its effectiveness for smaller language models (LMs) and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Suhas Kamasetty Ramesh , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise but remain challenging to continually improve through traditional finetuning, particularly when integrating capabilities from other specialized LLMs. Popular methods like ensemble…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Zhenglun Kong , Zheng Zhan , Shiyue Hou , Yifan Gong , Xin Meng , Pengwei Sui , Peiyan Dong , Xuan Shen , Zifeng Wang , Pu Zhao , Hao Tang , Stratis Ioannidis , Yanzhi Wang

The core learning signal used in language model distillation is the standard Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the student and teacher distributions. Traditional KL divergence tends to be dominated by the next tokens with the highest…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Sayantan Dasgupta , Trevor Cohn , Timothy Baldwin

Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing final outputs, yet it typically treats the teacher's intermediate layer's thought process as a black box. While feature-based distillation attempts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manish Dhakal , Uthman Jinadu , Anjila Budathoki , Rajshekhar Sunderraman , Yi Ding

Large language models have become increasingly popular and demonstrated remarkable performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are typically computationally expensive and difficult to be deployed in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Dongheng Li , Yongchang Hao , Lili Mou

In this paper, we study the statistical and geometrical properties of the Kullback-Leibler divergence with kernel covariance operators (KKL) introduced by Bach [2022]. Unlike the classical Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence that involves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Clémentine Chazal , Anna Korba , Francis Bach

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a model compression algorithm that helps transfer the knowledge of a large neural network into a smaller one. Even though KD has shown promise on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Tianda Li , Ahmad Rashid , Aref Jafari , Pranav Sharma , Ali Ghodsi , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh

A recent trend in Natural Language Processing is the exponential growth in Language Model (LM) size, which prevents research groups without a necessary hardware infrastructure from participating in the development process. This study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Jan Philip Wahle

Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a substantial strategy for transferring learned knowledge from one neural network model to another. A vast number of methods have been developed for this strategy. While most method designs a more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Yen-Chang Hsu , James Smith , Yilin Shen , Zsolt Kira , Hongxia Jin

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omri Ben-Dov , Luiz F. O. Chamon

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique that compresses large teacher models by training smaller student models to mimic them. The success of KD in auto-regressive language models mainly relies on Reverse KL for mode-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jun Rao , Xuebo Liu , Zepeng Lin , Liang Ding , Jing Li , Dacheng Tao , Min Zhang

Recent advances in Entity Resolution (ER) have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving strong performance but at the cost of substantial computational resources or high financial overhead. Existing LLM-based ER approaches operate…

Databases · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Alexandros Zeakis , George Papadakis , Dimitrios Skoutas , Manolis Koubarakis

Large-scale language models have recently demonstrated impressive empirical performance. Nevertheless, the improved results are attained at the price of bigger models, more power consumption, and slower inference, which hinder their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Kevin J Liang , Weituo Hao , Dinghan Shen , Yufan Zhou , Weizhu Chen , Changyou Chen , Lawrence Carin

Selecting an appropriate divergence measure is a critical aspect of machine learning, as it directly impacts model performance. Among the most widely used, we find the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, originally introduced in kinetic…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-07-16 Gennaro Auricchio , Giovanni Brigati , Paolo Giudici , Giuseppe Toscani